ERROR: “Failed to connect to ParcelPanel. Cannot connect website”
Other Information
My website is in Wordpress and I am trying out a plugin called ParcelPanel which gives tracking support for shipped packages to my customers. However, I am getting above error in the setting of that plugin. When I contacted the tech support of that plugin company, I was told that the webhost is rejecting the plugin’s calls to its servers. This seems to be documented in their installation instructions in their website.
I did some research thinking that the plugin is hacked and someone is wanting something, but it seems to be legit.
Is there a possibility that their servers can be added to hosting servers as “connectable”? Have you come across any such issue with any other infinityfree customers?
Custom whitelisting is likely not available on free hosting.
Please find out from their support what kind of connection is needed.
Be as specific as possible as free hosting do come with limitations.
Thanks. I read the article you linked. Maybe in this case, the ParcelPanel plugin is trying to make AJAX calls into their servers, though I did not confirm this. I will do that.
However, does that mean that, if I am hosting a website that is making calls to external APIs that I am partnering with, from the server side (and not from the client browser), are those not going to succeed? I have another such website currently hosted and I see some functionality not working though I have not looked at the error logs yet. This server side behavior is not documented in the article and that talks only about browser based calls amongst other scenarios.
Calls from our hosting to ParcelPanel should just work. Normal API traffic from our hosting to other sites is not blocked by default. If ParcelPanel says that we do, please ask them to provide the hostname/IP/port/URL that’s supposedly being blocked on our end so we can check it.
The “cannot connect website” error could also mean that ParcelPanel is simply not able to connect back to your site. That’s not going to work due to the security system that @KangJL referred to. So if ParcelPanel needs to be able to talk to your website, to send updates regarding shipments for example, that doesn’t work on free hosting, unfortunately.
The tech team from ParcelPanel said that their plugin on my site could not connect their servers and not my own site. They did give an IP address to pass on to the hosting provider which I did not care to write down or copy. I will try connecting with them again and get that IP to you.
ParcelPanel plugin talking to my own website from my browser should succeed as it is not a CORS request and a normal AJAX request which the article @KangJL shared above also mentions. ParcelPanel server talking to my website will not work, I agree.
I took a quick poke through the plugin code to see if I could find an API URL. I was able to find the URL https://wp.parcelpanel.com/api/v1/user/wc as being a URL on their API that allows GET requests.
I created a very simple testing script on https://beautifulnbold.com/_pptest.php that tries to access this URL. It just works. It currently says “Server error”. That’s an error from their server being returned to the script, most likely. You can change the /user/wc parts to other things, and get 404 and 405 errors, all returned from their server.
So I don’t know where they get the idea from that we are blocking access to their servers. Because this script proves that there is no problem at all connecting from our servers to their platform.
If they say that we’re blocking the connection, then please ask them for a code snippet that shows this. Because the code snippet I made tells me that we’re not blocking anything.
Thank you @Admin for that time/effort. So, it does seem some issue on their side. I will relay these findings to them. For now, I will not the plugin until I hear from them.
I will open a new issue later on if they come back with some proof, thanks again!